Panther Creek Private Bridge

Information and Findings From Ohio's Historic Bridge Inventory

Setting/Context

The bridge carries a private drive over a stream at 8455 Sugar Grove Road in a rural setting with scattered modern and period houses. The bridge serves a 1.5-story, vernacular house (ca. 1920-30) on the north side of the stream.

Physical Description

The 1-span, 80'-long, 6-panel bowstring, thru truss bridge is supported on stone abutments. The upper chord is a built-up section of toe-out channels with cover plate and battens. There is upper-lateral bracing of laced angles between the arch crowns at midspan. The verticals are laced angles, and the diagonals are loop-welded eyebars. The lower-chords are bars with riveted splice plates. The upper-chord connections are pins. The lower-chord connections are formed by cast-iron connecting pieces that rest atop the built-up fishbelly floorbeams and have cradles to hold two pins for the diagonal connections. The lower vertical connections are formed by bolts that pass through the flanges of the floorbeams. Another cast-iron piece rests atop the lower chord bars, forming a spacer as well as a cradle for looping an inverted U-shaped hanger for the floorbeam.

Integrity

The bridge has integrity of materials and design. It is unknown if this is its original location.

Summary of Significance

The ca. 1880 bowstring truss bridge is a technologically significant example of its type/design based on its state of completeness and details, especially the lower-chord connection (Criterion C). The lower-chord connection is similar in style to documented examples built by the Wrought Iron Bridge Company, but it is not the patented tubular upper chord associated with the company's earlier work from the 1870s (see, e.g., 5930197). This bridge may represent a transition design from the tubular upper chords of the 1870s to a more conventional upper chord of channels with cover plate and battens. This is the only identified bowstring truss bridge in the inventory with this combination of details.

Bowstring trusses are characterized by arched top chords and a trussed or lattice web. They rank among the rarest and most technologically significant of 19th-century metal truss designs since they appeared early in the evolution of iron bridge development and were almost always based on the patents or proprietary designs of bridge builders and engineers. The progenitor of the form was the famed engineer Squire Whipple of New York, who built the first example in 1840 over the Erie Canal at Utica. After the Civil War, Ohio was a center for the development of the bowstring with its concentration of metal bridge-building companies. Companies such Wrought Iron Bridge, Champion Bridge, Massillon Bridge, and King Iron Bridge built their reputations on successful bowstring designs with a dizzying number of variant ways of forming and connecting the truss members. The companies emerged in time to fill the burgeoning demand for an economical, prefabricated bridge for use on American roads. Bowstring trusses thus document this exceptionally inventive and technologically significant period in the development of American metal trusses from the 1860s to early 1880s. The ODOT inventory has identified 22 surviving examples dating from ca. 1864 to 1880 (Phase 1A, 2008).

Justification

The bridge is one of the 22 extant bowstring truss bridges that survive in the state. Having so many is remarkable, and even though they are "common" based on their numbers, each is an important and irreplaceable record of the development of the metal truss bridge and the ingenuity associated with the Ohio industrial development. The bridge has high significance.

Bridge Considered Historic By Survey: Yes